Automatic Synthesis of Regular Expressions from Examples

We propose a system for the automatic generation of regular expressions for text-extraction tasks. The user describes the desired task only by means of a set of labeled examples. The generated regexes may be used with common engines such as those that are part of Java, PHP, Perl and so on. Usage of the system does not require any familiarity with regular expressions syntax. We performed an extensive experimental evaluation on 12 different extraction tasks applied to real-world datasets. We obtained very good results in terms of precision and recall, even in comparison to earlier state-of-the-art proposals. Our results are highly promising toward the achievement of a practical surrogate for the specific skills required for generating regular expressions, and significant as a demonstration of what can be achieved with GP-based approaches on modern IT technology

The Reaction Time to Web Site Defacements

Web site defacement has become a common threat for organizations exposed on the web. There exist several statistics that indicate the number of incidents of this sort but there is a crucial piece of information still lacking: the typical duration of a defacement. Clearly, a defacement lasting one week is much more harmful than one of few minutes. In this paper we present the results of a two months monitoring activity that we performed over more than 62000 defacements in order to figure out whether and when} a reaction to the defacement is taken. We show that such time tends to be unacceptably long---in the order of several days---and with a long-tailed distribution. We believe our findings may improve the understanding of this phenomenon and highlight issues deserving attention by the research community